A people counter refers to a device for counting the number of persons unidirectionally or bidirectionally using an infrared beam process or a thermal image process.
In some cases, the people counter may be used to count occupancy and transit time in a particular place.
With recent advance of image analysis technologies, a technique for identifying and monitoring a moving object in an image has been widely applied to control system.
In addition, there is an increasing attempt to apply such a moving object identifying and monitoring technique to people counters.
FIG. 1 is a view showing an existing moving object identification system for detection of a moving object. This existing moving object identification system can determine whether objects 11 and 13 moving in a space 10 are people 12 or not 14 by identifying the objects and monitoring their moving path or detecting their shape through a camera 100.
However, such an existing moving object identification system has to store three dimensional information for the space and feature information of the moving objects for identification and monitoring of the moving objects and requires customization for a space in which the system is installed, which makes it difficult to apply the system to a general-purpose people counter.
In order to overcome the above disadvantage and facilitate the application of the moving object identification technique to the people counter, an approach has been recently employed, which sets a virtual line in a particular position within an image, monitors movement of a moving object and performs a counting operation when the moving object crosses the set virtual line.
FIG. 2 is a view showing an existing count system for count of a moving object, in which a counting operation is performed when the moving object or a person in the image crosses a virtual line 25 set by a user on a screen 20 on which the image is displayed.
However, such a count system also requires adjustment for count depending on how to analyze an image for identification of the person or the moving object in the image.
For example, if there is a case where a single person 21 and 22 crosses the virtual line 25 and another case where two or more persons cross the virtual line 25, setting and adjustment for easy distinction therebetween and correct count are required.
However, such an existing count system provides only a manual setting to cause troublesome setting and adjustment, which is not fit for the nature of a count system requiring easy setting depending on the position and angle of a camera and the type of a moving object to be counted in an image.
That is, such an existing count system has a disadvantage in that different calculation values matching different environments have to be manually set, persistently modified and correctly applied for actual use in order to decrease count inaccuracy which may be produced due to different environmental characteristics of the image. This imposes a big burden on a manager who manages the system, and makes it difficult for common users to use the system, which results in difficulty in generalization of the count system, low reliability for accuracy of the system, and difficult verification of the system.